Where Can I Pray?

When traveling you are frequently confronted with unfamiliar surroundings. If you are lucky enough to be traveling in an area with a large Muslim population, you will probably not have much difficulty finding a masjid or musalla to pray, or at least someone will be able to offer a spare room. What about traveling in largely non-Muslim lands?

One great resource that I use is Islamic Finder. Once upon a time I had a meager prayer times calculation site that went through a series of rewrites and hosting changes which I eventually abandoned because the guys at Islamic Finder were doing such a great job. Not only does their site assist with Qibla determination and prayer timings, but it can help find Muslim owned business and mosques all over the world. This is especially handy when moving to a new area, or even just a long visit.

What about while you are traveling, or if Islamic Finder comes up short? I have been known to pray in a spare spot in a parking lot, or stop off at a rest stop on the highway. When I travel I keep my compass with me and usually have looked up prayer times in advance. I take advantage of the ease allowed to us by combining prayers when traveling, and remember that all of the Earth is a musalla (with a few exceptions).

The tricky part, I have found, is when I'm traveling by plane or train. You can't ask them to pull over, and you have long waits in the terminal while waiting to leave. In the US for sure, and I'm sure many other countries, airports frequently have a "chapel", "prayer room", "meditation room" or "quiet place". Hunt these down. Not only can you pray in peace and safety, but they frequently have a small shelf with donated Qur'ans and prayer rugs. Many times someone has indicated in some way where the Qibla is as well. I have had a hard time locating these rooms, they don't always show up on all maps (like in Incheon airport in Seoul Korea), but eventually I usually find one. Checking websites for airports in advance to plan out where you'll be able to pray doesn't hurt either.

Where is the Qibla?

This is a tricky one. How do you determine what way to pray when you are away from home (or move into a new home) and aren't in a Masjid or Musullah? There are a few different methods, and each has its strengths and weaknesses:

GPS Method

This is the easiest of the three methods, but also the most expensive. Any GPS receiver won't do, it must be a GPS receiver that can point from where you are toward another geographic spot in the world. Many camping/backpacking, orienteering, geocaching, fishing, hunting, etc. GPS models will have this ability. You enter the latitude and longitude of Mecca and it points the way. Easy peasy, but not so cheap.

Compass Method

This method is relatively cheap since a compass can cost just $10 or $15 but unlike the GPS method requires some know how and some calculations. First you will need to know what direction Mecca is (from my house this would be 56.5° from north) this already shows our first difficulty: using an accurate compass. Mine is marked by every other degree meaning that it can tell me 54°, 56°, 58° but certainly not to the 1/2°. This can make a big difference over a vast distance (like that to Mecca) but any method used can't be assured to be 100% correct without getting a professional surveyor to do it for you. The next issue with this method is that the calculations provide you the direction toward Mecca using the north pole. And your compass uses the "magnetic north pole" to tell you the direction. And, here's the tricky part, they aren't the same place. Why aren't they the same place? The short answer is that the magnetic north pole is around Greenland. The long answer is here. How can you adjust for this difference? Via more calculations. The National Geophysics Data Center is kind enough to calculate this for me, and determine the difference between my calculation and reality is -10.67°or -10.5° if I round it. Great so now what do I do with that number? The long answer is here and covers each situation of what kind of compass you have and what you are trying to do with it. In the case of finding the Qibla the answer is I need to subtract the number I recived from the calculation or: 56.5° - -10.5° = 67° from north (since subtracting a negative is the same as adding...).

Sun Method

This method has the advantage of being essenntially free, and very accurate, but has the disadvantage of only working a couple times a day, and requires visibility of the sun. It's a great method to use when you move to a new house to ensure that your prayers are dead on, but when traveling it isn't so handy. IslamicFinder.org will provide the details, for example from my house. They calculate when a sundial (or your) shadow will point directly toward Mecca (or directly away or at a 90° angle). At that time you view the shadow of a sundial (or flagpole, etc. etc.) and note the direction and then try to duplicate that inside your house.

Whichever method you pick, it may require some planning in advance. Either purchasing and carying the GPS receiver, having the compass calculations at hand, or the URLs required to get the numbers you need at hand, or programs installed on your portable technology that will arrive at the numbers required, or the sun calculations at hand. Of course now that I've posted this with links, I guess you can just remember muslimtogo.blogspot.com and visit a nearby Internet Cafe wherever you go...

Update: Great tip from reader Ibrahim Shafi is the website Qibla Locator. A great mash-up using google maps so you can zoom right into the building you are in and use landmarks or your knowledge of the facility to site your qibla very accurately. Kudos to ibn Mas'ud, great job.

Electronic Reader

An electronic reader is an outstanding way to take your Islam with you, in concept at least. As I mentioned last time Pocket Islam does have a Qur'an Reader included, but I found it always booted into Arabic and always reset to Al Fatiha. I can't remember where I left off.

On my Palm OS device so many years ago I found iSilo. A good enough reader, even good enough that I purchased a copy. They appear to have versions for Palm, Windows CE, Windows Mobile, and Symbian. The documents are easy enough to find, and when you can't you can use their program to convert HTML into an iSilo document. Using an HTML spider program you can even rip a copy of a Qur'an or Hadith collection and then convert that into iSilo.

Recently, however, I think I found better. Mobipocket supports Palm, Windows CE, Windows Mobile, Windows, Symbian, and Blackberry. It also natively runs on the Iliad and Cybook readers and non-DRM Mobipocket docs can be read on the new Amazon.com Kindle. Mobipocket (which seems to be owned by Amazon.com) even has a creator program that converts a few different formats: PDF, Word, Text, HTML. You can then package covert art, create a table of contents, etc. I used this to convert a PDF of the meaning of the Qur'an in English as translated by Muhsin Khan.

The Qur'an looks good enough on my PDA phone, but it's still a small screen, and the backlight keeps turning off. I've ordered an eReader that uses eInk (the above mentioned Kindle) and I hope that it is large enough and easy enough to read that I can bring it to salat jumah and get some reading in before the khutbah begins. The Islamia website appears to have multiple documents available for download that should be easily converted for use in either iSilo or Mobipocket, though I can't vouch for their authenticity.